Q&A: Victor Cui, a Fighting Champ With Billion Dollar Dreams

Victor Cui, the CEO of Asia’s fastest-growing mixed martial arts organization, says One Fighting Championship is on track to become a billion dollar company.

ONE FC

Victor Cui is working to build a billion dollar company using the grit that has made him a taekwondo master, the gift of knowing what makes good TV and dreams of introducing the world to Asian sports heroes.

The president and CEO of ONE Fighting Championship, Asia’s fastest growing mixed martial arts organization, was born in Canada but has always felt pulled toward Asia, he says, noting his Filipino heritage.

Mr. Cui now lives in with his wife – also a taekwondo black belt – and children in Singapore, where ONE FC is headquartered.

His nearly two decades of work in entertainment media, primarily assessing how televised sports could grow audience share and money, have served Mr. Cui well. ONE FC, a company he launched nearly three years ago, is now Asia’s biggest MMA group in terms of revenue, number of fighters and audience reach.

“We’re definitely on track to become a billion dollar company in the next couple of years,” Mr. Cui told the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.

Unlike Ultimate Fighting Championship, ONE FC’s Western counterpart, Mr. Cui said getting people to pay to watch each fight through cable television is not the model for Asia because of low cable penetration and a small market for online credit card purchases. Instead, ONE FC earns money from advertisements and charging fees for broadcast rights.

Mr. Cui shared some other thoughts on the sport with The Wall Street Journal ahead of next month’s fight in Manila.

WSJ: What brought you to think that you could do MMA in Asia?

Victor Cui, the president and CEO of One Fighting Championship, stands next to a championship belt at a fight in Kuala Lumpur in February 2013.

ONE FC

Mr. Cui: I’ve worked in media for over 17 years – with ESPN Star Sports, the largest broadcaster in Asia, and now Fox Sports. My job at [ESPN] was to look at every sporting property in the world to figure out how the company could make more money. When you do due diligence on sports, on how a sport property can make more money, you look at things like scalability. Is the fan base growing? Is the popularity growing? Is the athletes’ base expanding? You look at all these check marks that make a fantastic sports property because not all sports are exciting. So I looked at every sport you could think of to find the opportunities. You name the sport and I’ve done the analysis on it: bowling, tennis, football, golf, darts, marching bands, billiards.

And one of the biggest opportunities that I’ve unearth is MMA, because this sport is exploding in America. It is the world’s fastest growing sport and the penetration in Asia is zero. And like every business industry you see a natural duopoly emerge – Samsung versus Apple, Twitter versus Sina Weibo. I saw this natural duopoly, where a Western concept gets taken into Asia, brought by an Asian businessman, adapted for Asian tastes and becomes, in some cases, a bigger business than the original.

WSJ: Where did you get the investments initially to launch the business and how have you seen it grow?

Mr. Cui: I’ve been very lucky. ONE FC is backed by a very successful group of serial entrepreneurs, all multimillionaires that have taken businesses from scratch to [initial public offering]. We have a very seasoned board of advisers that understood this is how you make a billion-dollar property. We build world-class entertainment and we televise it for the world to watch. We are the only sport property in Asia that has a 10-year television deal with Fox. That is unprecedented, nobody has that. There is no sports organization in Asia that has grown as fast as we have.

WSJ: That 10-year contract with Fox Sports, what does it entail?

Mr. Cui: This year, we’re basically doing one event a month. Next year, I’d like to double that.

WSJ: What’s the main hurdle for the company?

The president of One Fighting Championship stands in the ring with two ring girls. His sporting organization is the fastest-growing in Asia, giving him a lot to smile about.

ONE FC

Mr. Cui: To expand quickly to where all the opportunities are. ONE FC has 90% market share in Asia. By every major metric, we dominate the market. We have the best fighters in all of Asia. We have the biggest list of blue chip sponsors. In the Philippines, we have Petron, Casino Filipino, Resorts World. We have Sony and Disney. And we’re holding our events in the biggest venues.

WSJ: Do you have enough fighters to grow as fast as you would like?

Mr. Cui: There is no shortage of world-class fighters. Every fighter in the world wants to fight on the biggest stage they can. That’s what a martial artist is. If you are a wushu or judo expert, if you are a taekwondo guy and you’ve won a medal in the Olympics, what do you do after the Olympics? Mixed martial arts [provides] an avenue where these guys can make a professional career.

WSJ: How do you expand the mixed martial arts fan base?

Mr. Cui: There are two major obstacles for a sport to overcome to be successful as a global property. First is cultural relevance. It is why in the Philippines, even if you spend a billion dollars, ice hockey will never become popular. That’s the first important barrier. Second is the language barrier. If you are watching major league baseball and English is your second language, and you are hearing the commentary in English that sport doesn’t make any sense at all. So transcending the language barrier is key.

Mixed martial arts leaps over those two barriers. Everybody in Asia lives, breathes, or knows somebody that does boxing, wrestling, kung fu, judo. So the cultural relevance is very high. We know Jacky Chan, Bruce Lee, Jet Li. It’s part of the fabric of our daily lives. MMA is one of the few sports that you can watch with the volume off and you get it.

WSJ: What’s the future for women and Filipino fighters in this sport?

Mr. Cui: It’s too early to say. There are fewer female professional MMA fighters in Asia. But as we grow, more and more, high profile female fighters want to be a part of ONE FC. So we consider them. Our fans like to watch female fighters, and they are exciting to showcase. Our fastest growing demographic is women.